Born to a powerful family and educated at the prominent Mindroling Monastery, the Tibetan Buddhist nun and teacher Mingyur Peldron (1699 - 1769) leveraged her privileged status and overcame significant adversity, including exile during a civil war, to play a central role in the reconstruction of her religious community. Alison Melnick Dyer employs literary and historical analysis, centered on a biography written by the nun's disciple Gyurme Osel, to consider how privilege influences individual authority, how authoritative Buddhist women have negotiated their position in gendered contexts, and how the lives of historical Buddhist women are (and are not) memorialized by their communities. Mingyur Peldron's story challenges the dominant paradigms of women in religious life and adds nuance to our ideas about the history of gendered engagement in religious institutions. Her example serves as a means for better understanding of how gender can be both masked and asserted in the search for authority - operations that have wider implications for religious and political developments in eighteenth-century Tibet. In its engagement with Tibetan history, this study also illuminates the relationships between the Geluk and Nyingma schools of Tibetan Buddhism from the eighteenth century, to the nonsectarian developments of the nineteenth century.

Tibetan Nun Mingyur Peldron: A Woman of Power and Privilege, Alison Melnick Dyer, University of Washington Press, Paperback, 242 pp, $33.00

Alison Melnick Dyer is assistant professor of religious studies at Bates College. She specializes in the history of Tibetan and Chinese Buddhism, with a focus on the uses of hagiography and revelatory literature in the historical record. She enjoys teaching a wide range of courses in Asian Religious traditions. Her research considers questions at the intersection of authority, gender, privilege, and the role of the religious institution in Tibetan and Chinese literature and society, and she writes about how women exercise authority in these contexts.

CONTENTS: Tibetan Nun Mingyur Peldron
Acknowledgments	vii
Note to the Reader	xi
Chronology	xiii
Introduction	1
Chapter One. A Privileged Life	30
Chapter Two. Authorizing the Saint	67
Chapter Three. Multivocal Lives	104
Chapter Four. Mingyur Peldron the Diplomat	140
Chapter Five. The Death of Mingyur Peldron and the Making of a Saint	162
Tibetan Glossary	179
Notes	185
Bibliography	205
Index	215